Menu

Playing Too Hard, Part 2

After a playful spanking session with my newbie partner, I ended up with unintentional bruises and welts which hurt and lasted for several days. I was pretty upset by the whole situation even though I knew my partner hadn’t intentionally caused physical damage. However, my emotional state told me something was wrong. Very wrong.

It took several days of thinking about it, but I finally let myself go there, into the dark recesses of my mind where my worst memories are stored. I thought about how familiar this pain was. That was a frontier I hadn’t wanted to cross into. I really didn’t want to know what I was remembering, and yet I was going there even though I didn’t want to.

I finally admitted to myself that I knew this pain from a too vigorous spanking because I’d endured it many times before in my childhood. The abusive spankings from my father left me feeling this sore for hours and days afterward. As far as I remember, they were given with his hand only, but clearly on my small childhood frame, they were long enough and hard enough to be physically damaging.

As I child, I had never looked to see if I had marks. I was afraid of being caught looking at my own body. I’d been taught that my body was shameful and whatever behavior I’d done (or my parents thought I had done) to “earn” the abusive spankings was equally shameful. As a result, if I had been physically marked as a child from the abuse, I had never seen it on my own body. However, my body remembered. It knew this feeling. It recognized the pain.

For most of my adult life, I was unwilling to admit I was abused as a child. In more recent years, I’ve always consoled myself that part of the reason that I couldn’t say I was abused was because my parents never used implements on me and never left me bruised or welted. It turns out that at least part of my rationalization was not true, and I have been forced to quit denying the truth. There was no chance my body was lying to me about the pain I was feeling. I was bruised during many spankings in my childhood. I was abused.

Unfortunately, I didn’t feel I could talk to my sexual partner about what had happened to me mentally and emotionally after we played too hard. I just didn’t have the kind of trust in him and our relationship wasn’t deep enough. I talked to my therapist a bit, but not a lot. I am not out to her as kinky, so I only talked in terms of saying that I realized finally that the abuse was more violent than I previously had been willing to admit to myself.

I am still not sure what to do with the knowledge I gained from this session where my partner and I played too hard. I have had sex since then, but not kinky sex, and I’m not sure how I will be able to approach sexual spanking with my next kinky lover having this new yet old knowledge fully in my consciousness now.

I also don’t know if I’ll ever know the full truth of the abuse I endured as a child. My mind has repressed a lot of the worst of it. I also don’t think I really want to know any more details about what I endured. There’s a reason my mind has hidden it from me. What I know is hard enough to cope with. The more I learn, the harder it is for me to handle.

However, I now know why I don’t want to be marked or bruised, and I can let partners definitively know it brings up too much trauma from my abusive childhood. Most of my partners have been understanding about not wanting to retraumatize me and have been good about working to make our sex lives as positive as possible for both of us. I wish we didn’t have that obstacle to work around because the actual spanking session with my previous partner was a lot of fun while we were playing. The aftermath was just too triggering. Unfortunately, though, this is part of my reality that I now must face and so must my future partners.